350 years of the scientific journal: celebrating the anniversary of Philosophical Transactions

The first issue of the world’s first scientific journal was published on 6 March 1665. Its anniversary gives historians and scientists an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of scientific publishing

Title page of an early copy of the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. It celebrates its 350th anniversary today.
Photograph: Royal Society

The journal began life partly as a means of helping the Society in its stated aim of ‘promoting Natural Knowledge’, bringing natural philosophers into communication with one another, and keeping the Society’s correspondents abreast of news from the world of experimental learning. It was also a canny way for Oldenburg to turn his unpaid labours on the Society’s behalf to monetary advantage.

The characteristic attributes of modern scientific papers – including their deliberately dry and objective style and the vital process of peer review – took a long time to emerge but the innovation of periodical publishing in the sciences was an instant success. It was flexible, fast, and cheaper and less risky for contributing authors than the self-publication that was common at the time. It also doubled as a system of registration and priority – public, printed, date-stamped proof that you had published your results ahead of your rival.

Useful in themselves, these early innovations pale in comparison with what was claimed for the journal later on. The biologist T.H. Huxley observed in 1866, just after the journal’s bicentennial, that if all books printed since 1665 were destroyed except the Transactions there would remain a decent if necessarily incomplete record of humanity’s intellectual progress during that time.

Later still the peer-reviewed scientific journal came to be regarded as something close to holy, the embodiment of human knowledge in an age of rapid advances and the guardian of scientific probity. It also became the model for academic publishing across all disciplines. Estimates suggest there are as many as 30,000 scientific journals now in print. It’s safe to say that the scientific periodical has spectacularly transcended Oldenburg’s original idea of it.

This is not to say that it was all plain sailing from the start. Significant practical disruptions occasioned by plague, fire and war in the 1660s were in some ways less significant than issues of trust. Some of Oldenburg’s colleagues thought he was far too free in communicating other men’s ideas; subsequent editors, meanwhile, would be variously accused of corruption, favouritism, and incompetence, and the Royal Society was forced to take the Transactions over in 1753 to preserve both its own and the journal’s reputation.

The takeover led to the gradual systematisation of scientific publishing, replacing the complete freedom of action of the early editors with rule-bound committees. In the early 19th century reformers began to object that too many of the Fellows of the Society were rich dilettantes with no real scientific interests or qualifications, and to deplore their influence on the Transactions – a complaint that led to the introduction of systematic peer review in the journal.

This anniversary is a good moment to re-examine the complexities of the journal’s past; all the more so because the scientific journal is going through a period of radical uncertainty. The manner in which science is and isn’t made public has become a hot topic. Questions are being raised about the legitimacy of publicly funded research being accessible only behind paywalls, and research councils and learned societies are increasingly committed to open-access publishing of the research they fund. Elsewhere, there is concern about the threat to peer review posed by the selective publication of results or by outright fraud, and about the availability of the data underlying published conclusions. Shadowing all this is the consideration that major international science publishers have been showing operating profits of 35% or even higher in recent years, through a system that relies on vast quantities of free labour donated by authors, academic editors and peer reviewers.

This isn’t an entirely new issue. Early science in Britain also relied on donated labour – and this remained true for a length of time that might demoralise people with a belief in science as an index of human progress, including the aforementioned Huxley, who often bemoaned the shortage of scientific career opportunities in the 19th century. Many scientific journals foundered due to lack of money or interest; even the Transactions made a continuous 270-year loss after Oldenburg’s death, and certainly owes its survival to heavy subsidy from his successors as owner/editor and later from the Society itself.

The world’s first scientific journal was kept going for close to three centuries as a principled and financially draining commitment to the advancement of knowledge, even when it threatened the viability of the Society as a whole. This has been the challenge for scientific journals, historically; how to balance the disinterested promotion of science with the need to give its practitioners a fair shake. For Oldenburg, who depended upon the free communication of other people’s ideas, that balance threatened to break down when some of his colleagues were unwilling to expose their work to criticism or see it broadcast in ways they couldn’t control. In the 18th century it came to be embodied in the idea of editorship by committee, designed to guard against blackballing and nepotism. In the 19th, the reforms that gave rise to the modern form of peer review were originally instituted so as to eliminate social position and elevate scientific merit as factors in assessing research. By shifting the responsibility for assessing papers from committees to individuals chosen for their expertise these reforms paved the way for the return of powerful individual editors.

It’s these, in turn, and the perceived opacity of the peer review process in the present, as well as concerns about who benefits from the current model of commercial scientific publishing, that have led to increased calls for open access and open peer review. These are serious matters that bear upon the reliability of scientific knowledge and professional equity among scientists, and we could well be facing a major fracture point in the history of science communication.

The historical study of similar fracture points in the past shows us the changing solutions, each responding to the last, applied to a remarkably consistent endeavour – the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. And whatever the outcome of current debates, it seems highly likely that the future of scientific communication will continue to depend on the same disinterestedness, and the same generosity with their time, knowledge and advice, that the advancement of science has always relied upon from scientists.

Noah Moxham is a postdoctoral research fellow in the school of history at the University of St Andrews, working on Publishing the Philosophical Transactions, a four-year project funded by the AHRC and led by Dr Aileen Fyfe, tracing the social, cultural and economic history of the world’s first scientific journal.

The Royal Society is marking the anniversary of Philosophical Transactions with a year-long programme of events celebrating the journal’s past, present and future, as well as a series of workshops on the future of scholarly scientific communications.